We’re beyond excited to see the PACEs Connection community back in action! A huge shout out to @Dana Brown (PACEs Connection Staff) and @Carey Sipp for all the hard work they’ve put into making this happen. It’s inspiring to witness the ongoing collaboration in this space and to see how many of us are committed to building cultures of resilience. For @Andi Fetzner and me, this community has been incredibly meaningful. Our journey together started back in 2016, when we met in the registration...

Origins Training & Consulting was proud to partner with Eisner Health to share their journey of implementing trauma-informed care at the National Association of Community Health Centers annual Community Health Institute in Chicago. To learn more about the lessons learned from Eisner Health's experience, you can download the full paper at https://originstraining.org/eisner-healths-journey-through-implementing-trauma-informed-care/ Thanks to ACEs Aware for funding this paper!

I learned to ski as an adult so I will never be great, but I absolutely love it and can hold my own. As my two older kids have long surpassed me in terms of skill level, one of the things I now do when I go on a hard run with them is to let them go first and watch what they do. I look for the path they take, how fast they go, where they struggle, and then make adjustments based on my own strengths and challenges. When Origins Co-Founder Andi Fetzner and I started Origins back in 2017, the...

By: Lori Chelius, MBA/MPH “Stories are data with a soul.” Brene Brown Eisner Health’s journey through implementing trauma-informed care (TIC) began more than six years ago when Chief Medical Officer Dr. Deborah Lerner attended a conference focused on community healthcare and wandered into a session hosted by a social worker who worked for the San Diego Police Department. The social worker’s story of how TIC had transformed her work planted a seed in Dr. Lerner’s mind, which continued growing...

“So I want to get this straight...in our family, when something gets tough, we just give it away?” That’s what Jill Stamm’s daughter, who was six years old at the time, asked her parents after they concluded they would have to find another home for their rambunctious puppy who was destroying furniture and eating everything in sight. Stamm was stunned. That was not a value she embraced at all...

“Change culture and you change lives. You can also change the course of history. Many well-meaning social activists overlook this essential fact. They focus relentlessly on strategy, but strategy means nothing to our bodies and our lizard brains. When strategy competes with culture, culture wins–every time.” ~Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands No one can dispute Valorie Kondos Field’s record of winning. During her 29 years as head coach of the UCLA women’s gymnastics team, she led her...

When I was an adolescent and young adult, I struggled with depression. As I reflect back on that time, so much of what I was experiencing was deeply tied to coming to terms with my sexuality. Growing up in the 1980’s in a relatively conservative town, I was closeted (even to myself) until I was a young adult. The pain and fear of being different, of not belonging, of being judged or rejected for who I was more than my adolescent brain could wrap its conscious head around.

My wife works for an educational company and her past few weeks have been busy working with schools and districts across California as they face the herculean task of adapting to distance learning for the remainder of the school year. One of my favorite stories from last week comes from a training that one of her colleagues was conducting with a school site. During the training, without skipping a beat, the trainer announced that his daughter had just handed him their pet mice and he was now doi

I remember my enthusiasm when I first stumbled upon the ACEs study…In my eagerness to learn as much as I could about the emerging trauma-informed movement, I brought this topic up to as many people as I could to learn more. In one of those conversations, something that a colleague with a school-based mental health background said really struck me: “None of this is new--we have been talking about these concepts in school-based mental health for decades. It’s just new language.”

With graduation season upon us, I have been thinking a lot about one of my favorite graduation speeches. It’s the speech that Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy, gave in 2014 at Dartmouth College. She references the typical expected advice from a graduation speech: “Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big..." And then she says, “I think that’s crap.”

Sitting on my bookshelf in my office is a framed copy of Time Magazine from April 14, 1997. On the cover is a picture of Ellen DeGeneres with the headline “Yep, I’m Gay,” When President Obama awarded Ellen the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2016, he said “It’s easy to forget now just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages 20 years ago.”

Origins offers a number of training and consulting services. We developed The Basics as a half-day session to provide the foundation to support trauma-informed and resilience practices across sectors and industries. The session includes an overview of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, the neurobiology of toxic stress, the impact of social and historical trauma, and the science of resilience. We have tested The Basics with two cross-sector audiences, in Los Angeles and Phoenix.